steve_bank resurrected this thread after I posted
this:
unless you invoke mind as separate form body, mind body duality, it comes down to how the brain works. To me that apples to the OP question of free will vs determinism.
I think it applies to the duality perspective as well. After all, even dualists develop. Duality or not, the brain develops. Duality or not, the ability to think develops. Maybe not very much in some cases, but on this matter it is better to be generous. I regard the free will vs. determinism topic first and foremost as a very good context for analyzing experience and thought processes as well as how thinking can be affected and effected by the thinking subject. Whether determinism is fact or not is a side issue which I assume to be an undecidable matter. But I do know that any philosophical thinking (as distinct from a devotion) which imagines as its foundation a science as something other than a human enterprise imbued with judgments is an immature sort of philosophical thinking, lacking adequate imagination and thereby leading to insufficient critical introspection.
Now, to add to that, let me refer to something bilby said years ago:
Objective is synonymous with observer independence; Subjective with observer dependence.
I think objective is well regarded/approached in terms of invariance or invariants. Invariance is detected usually via abstraction from the expressions of multiple subjective perspectives or even from the expressive perspectives of multiple subjects.
Quite.
I will note that relativity forces us into a position where we can't exist but as subjective observers. I find this whole language interesting because it discusses a certain form of duality, of some thing that is there, but that it is also like something to be that thing, something not experienced at the location of the observer except through those abstractions.
This is why I was discussing systemic internality in the other thread: the subjective is in many cases bound to "the present context and model of the machine".
If I was expected to say "use your intuition to try to spot Subjective Experience in a Large Language Model", I would point to it's context, with it's tokenizer. While there are many subjective experiences had in the interim, the context itself represents a momentary totality of that experience.
If I really wanted to torture myself, I could make such a system that core-dumps it's complete state, and then I wouldn't even need to halt it in that moment, granted the nature of that moment of its experiences are much more difficult to quantify (or to store), and also model-dependent in a way the "context" is not. I actually did torture myself to do this with the B787 environment. That's why I can know it's possible, albeit difficult.
The interesting part is that we can objectively observe that subjective experience happening, which implies that for every subjective experience there may well be some particular class of event happening there in an entirely objective
if arbitrary way, and even if the "way" is rather abstract (such as 'computational equivalence' despite operational time differences).
Systems like the ones we build can operate in really dumb ways if we program them dumbly, and there are infinite ways to do that, in far greater proportion as we count than ways to program well, for whatever problem you choose.
Sometimes its really more a matter of "how dumbly we program", because there's no way we know of to do it any better way.
But like the computer's configuration, neurons can be arranged rather arbitrarily, or re-arranged, or die off in particular patterns that are less useful than others. They are subject to whatever arbitrary logic their configuration organizes to create. They get one view (or set of views), and it's not even guaranteed to be right or even mostly sane.
Subjectivity is built into the "beliefs" of such systems, the biases and functional parameters and settings which bind their inputs to their outputs, or which act as primal inputs speaking things regularly to things which will interpret what they say in some uniform way.
Subjectivity is in the experience of some thought droning in your head "you are a ____", something near the core of your "identity" making a claim about you that you cannot ignore.
These things are, much like the drone pipes on a bagpipe, still objects in their own right. It is objectively true that someone has such a subjective experience. It is more that it is the product of some manner of arbitrariness. It is entirely arbitrary, owing to the order the neurons are placed in, whether they say "you are a good person" or "you aren't a good person, and if you think that you are you will assuredly grow to not be," or "you are not, and you will never be because you don't really want to be, anyway".
This might, however, come from some set of objective facts, some manner of logic, and then it moves from subjective observation, to something invariant upon some application of logic.
Then, there is also this topic of "subjects of discussion", which heavily relates. Indeed, you can say "the subject of this sentence is objectively experiencing what they subjectively frame as 'just fine, thank you', via the satisfaction of the finenness heuristic right at the <err_location_not_known>."
I don't agree that abstractions are "subjective", however. I think they are "physically derivative" or perhaps "derived laws of physics".
While it is an abstraction to think of what a "bear trap" "could" do, it is objectively true, invariant, that when certain forces i
Within some range interact with any "bear trap" object, the "bear trap" will "close".
That is simple physics, which while an abstraction, provides invariant statements. Also, I think it's about time for another bong rip.
The Moral Landscape.
